Monday, April 7, 2014

DIY Telescope Pier, Failures & Success


How NOT to build a telescope pier using concrete

How TO mount your telescope pier to the earth

How to build a telescope pier using a welding gas bottle and two brake rotors

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9OL2Z7Fz_1nLWtNamNVRG10OFk/edit?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9OL2Z7Fz_1nQXMzdEhnSGw5bjg/edit?usp=sharing

Friday, April 4, 2014

Unboxing and Assembling the Grizzly Soprano Ukulele kit

I ordered Grizzly Ukulele kit model H3125 from Amazon for $36.
It came in just a few days.


Box was smaller than I thought it would be.

Right off the bat I was impressed by the depth of the lines in the wood of the body.

All the parts were there. I didn’t like the tuners, so I bought machine tuners on Amazon for $5, black with gold plating.
Also, I bought a set of Aguila strings. Don’t recall the costs of those, but they’re available on Amazon all the time.
You don’t really have to do this, but I put the neck and body in the sun for about 2 weeks to deepen the grain and the contrast in the wood. The UV in the sunlight gives the wood a suntan look, and makes the darks darker.


I decided right away I wasn’t going to use the rosette sticker around the sound hole.
Fit of the neck joint wasn’t anywhere near as good as I would have liked, so I did some sanding and fitting.

Looking inside the body, there is some excess glue.  It looks like hot glue, or perhaps urethane glue.


Nice blocking.
Gap in this lining.


Neck joint before sanding:

The manual is really very good. Follow it and you can’t go too far wrong.

Once the neck joint was flush and the surfaces mated up, I glued up the neck joint. Rubber bands for clamping.


Next step is to glue on the fingerboard.  Again, rubber bands, & add pencils.


This is the glue I used.

Here it is, glued up and ready to start sanding.

Now I skip a few steps in the photos. I sanded the body, and beveled the fingerboard sides, smooth sanded the neck, then finish sanded everything except the fingerboard surface.
Then I masked the fingerboard and the spot where the bridge would be glued onto the top of the body, and started laying on coats of shellac.
I applied a few thick coats, then sanded most of it off to try to fill the pores. Then I layed on a few coats thinned with acetone. Finally I rubbed on about a dozen coats with a cotton wad, getting the solution thinner and thinner each time with acetone thinner.
Then I carefully measured, as the instructions said, and glued on the bridge.  The tuners went in pretty easy, but I had to clear out the holes, as some shellac got in there.
Here it is mostly strung up.

I had some trouble with one string. The bridge was too skinny, and that string popped out on me.  I filed the slot a bit to make it wider, and now don’t have any problems with it.
The place where the bridge glues on you don’t put any coating or shellac on. You don’t have to use shellac. I choose to, but urethane would have been fine, or just about any finish.
I did not feel any need to adjust bridge height. It plays easily with the bridge and saddle as it came.

You can hear the results in a four ukulele side-by-side play-off my daughter Pearl made and put on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPtPfhPIQKI

Mine is the homemade uke. It has a pleasant but quiet and soft sound, not bright or sharp.
Keep in mind it’s also a $36 instrument. Honestly, I had $100 worth of fun putting it together, and got a wonderful little instrument to play at the end.
I heartily recommend the Grizzly kit, and am building another with my son.